Wall Street puppet Obama claims it's improper for him to go after white collar criminal oligarchy, yet doesn't recuse himself in other areas

President Obama was interviewed by 60 Minutes‘ Steve Kroft last night. Kroft mentioned a new poll showing that 42% of Americans believe Obama’s policies most favor Wall Street rather than average Americans (only 35% believe the opposite). Kroft speculated that this was due in part to the fact that, as he put it, “there’s not been any criminal prosecutions of people on Wall Street,” and then asked Obama whether he was “disappointed” with that development. Obama replied:

I can’t, as President of the United States, comment on the decisions about particular prosecutions. That’s the job of the Justice Department, and we keep those separate so that there’s no political influence on decisions made by professional prosecutors.

If only that were what President Obama really believed and how he actually comported himself.

On January 12, 2009, The New York Times – under the headline: “Obama signals his reluctance to investigate Bush programs” — reported that “President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects”; specifically, he expressed the “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and announced that “part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.” On April 19, Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, went on ABC News and announced that the President opposes investigations not only for the CIA torturers themselves, but also high-level Bush officials who devised and authorized the policies...

[During the same time period, the Obama White House worked to block plans by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a Congressional investigation into those crimes, and also had its State Department pressure Spain to impede its own judiciary's investigation into the torture regime.]

So the White House, and the President himself, publicly harangued the DOJ for months not to prosecute Bush officials (once the damage was done and controversy erupted over the White House’s constant pressure on the “independent” DOJ, Obama cursorily acknowledged that it was a decision for the DOJ to make). Beyond that, the White House applied constant, intense political pressure on the Attorney General not to proceed with plans to try the 9/11 defendants in a civilian court. In April of this year, President Obama, while charges were pending, publicly decreed Bradley Manning guilty even though it is his direct military subordinates who will be judging Manning’s case, possibly jeopardizing that prosecution on the ground of undue command influence. And it was recently revealed that Obama officials are pressuring the New York State Attorney General to sign onto a full-scale settlement agreement with banks rather than continue to investigate Wall Street’s mortgage fraud. Even in this interview with Kroft, Obama observed from what he called “40,000 feet” that “some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn’t illegal.”

Does this sound like a President who actually believes that it’s improper for him to “comment on the decisions about particular prosecutions” to ensure “there’s no political influence on decisions made by professional prosecutors”? Or does this sound like a President who applies exactly that kind of political pressure on the DOJ when it suits him, and is now cynically invoking this excuse to avoid having to take responsibility for the virtually full-scale immunity given to the financial-crisis-causing Wall Street criminals under his watch?...MORE...LINK